Since The Atlantic Monthly published Anne-Marie Slaughter’s piece “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” back in 2012, the concept of “having it all” has been “evoked so frequently and facetiously that it has become akin to some malign joke—heard, hated, yet repeated ad nauseam.” The phrase garners eye-rolls from plenty of people, yet the debate over whether it’s really possible to “have it all,” and what that really means, stubbornly persists.…

As I get older and start to think about what that really means, though, I’m not so sure. I guess that depends on how we’re defining “all” these days. At its simplest, “having it all” seems to generally imply striving for some semblance of work/life balance—and that’s a goal nearly everyone can get behind, right? But I don’t think these three little words would have spawned so much debate (and so many think pieces) if the phrase weren’t loaded with heavier implications. Slaughter characterized “having it all” as a “feminist credo,” but a recent New York Times article, “The Complicated Origins of ‘Having It All,’” suggests that feminism isn’t to blame for promoting the (supposedly) “false promise” that women could “have it all—rewarding career, loving partner, cheerful brood.” History shows that the phrase was more “marketing pitch” than “feminist mantra” until the late 1970s, and didn’t gain “real cultural momentum” until 1982, when former Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown’s book, Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money… Even if You’re Starting with Nothing was published.

Of course, it turns out Helen Gurley Brown herself hated the title: “‘Having It All’ sounds so [expletive] cliché to me.”

I’d have to agree. For many women, balancing work and family is not a lofty goal, but a financial necessity. It’s not a question of whether you can have it all or want to have it all—it’s a question of how the hell you’re going to manage it all, because that’s the only available option. And for those who do have the option of “leaning out,” having it all can sound, as the New York Times put it, “less like peppy encouragement and more like an admonishment or reproach.” In Lean In, evenSheryl Sandberg laments that the coining of the phrase “having it all” constitutes “[p]erhaps the greatest trap ever set for women…. Bandied about in speeches, headlines, and articles, these three little words are intended to be aspirational but instead make all of us feel like we have fallen short.”

But what exactly are we falling short of? The myth of “having it all” seems to not only require merely balancing a job with family life, hopefully with a bit of sanity leftover (an ambitious enough goal, in my opinion). Instead, “having it all” suggests that women (always women!) are aiming to effortlessly balance a high-powered career with Pinterest-worthy motherhood, and look fabulous while doing it. That they’re still striving to work the same long hours, keep up with the same hobbies, and maintain the same social calendar they had before… while being supermom at the same time. Beyond the question of whether or not that’s actually possible, I’m not sure that’s what most women even want.

Not only is the assumption that a woman has to have a child to have it “all” offensive, it seems to discount the fact that balancing work and family can be challenging enough when you don’t have kids. I’m sure I’m not the only child-free working woman who frequently has weeks where I feel like I am falling behind in one area or another. Life can get complicated, and managing competing obligations and responsibilities isn’t a challenge that’s unique to motherhood.

But there’s no denying that caring for a child adds another layer of chaos. When I have a hectic week and start to feel like I am failing left and right, there’s a little voice in theback of my head whispering, “…and you don’t even have kids yet.” How am I going to manage all this, I wonder, when I throw some kids into the mix? Brown’s version of “all” included “Love, Success, Sex, Money,” so how did we tack on “and nurture tiny dependent humans,” without acknowledging the nearly inhuman balancing act this would require? Everyone has the same twenty-four hours in a day, so it’s only logical, when taking on something as major as parenting, that something else (or several somethings) has to give.

And, more importantly, how did we get to a point where this balancing act is reserved for working mothers, while the working fathers just… get on with things? (Tina Fey once recounted “the rudest question you can ask a woman”: “‘How do you juggle it all?’ people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. ‘You’re screwing it all up, aren’t you?’ their eyes say.”) No one seems to question whether a man can work and have kids. It’s just assumed that he will. Anne-Marie Slaughter suggests that, in addition to the fact that women are still socialized “to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver,” women also have the maternal instinct that can lead to a “reflexive” choice of family over career. But I’d suggest that the very idea that all women are just biologically inclined to give up their careers for their kids is, to borrow a phrase from Helen Gurley Brown, “so [expletive] cliché.”

In “I Am the Slacker Parent,” Meaghan O’Connell lamented, “If motherhood is an identity, then fatherhood, conventionally, is more like a very enriching side project. It’s voluntary, done in the hours between home-from-work and bath time.” Contrary to Slaughter’s assumption that many women “reflexively” choose family over career, plenty of mothers or women who intend to become mothers—myself included—simply have no interest in assuming the role of “primary caregiver.” Suggesting that women who prioritize a career are less “maternal” is just as offensive as suggesting that women (or men) who prioritize parenthood lack ambition.

While the biological fact of pregnancy tends to place women at the center of the “having it all” debate, plenty of men wrestle with the issue of work-life balance, as “[n]early half of fathers report dissatisfaction with the amount of time that they are able to spend with their children,” and the number of stay-at-home fathers continues to rise. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s former clerk, Ryan Park, wrote about temporarily becoming a stay-at-home dad, expressing his disagreement with the “underlying assumption that women and men have different visions of what matters in life—or, to be blunt about it, that men don’t find child-rearing all that rewarding.” Just recently, Google’s chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, announced his resignation, acknowledging that “so many people struggle to strike the right balance between work and personal life,” and that “life is wonderful, but nonetheless a series of trade offs, especially between business/professional endeavours and family/community.” But beyond these relatively rare instances of high-profile men acknowledging their own struggles to balance work and family, the “having it all” debate is nearly universally framed as a women’s issue.

But acting as though work-life balance is a struggle unique to women is problematic because this assumes that the responsibility for raising children still falls primarily to women while men are, presumably, free to build successful careers without balancing all those pesky familial obligations. Jennifer Garner once noted that, at a press junket, “every single person who interviewed me, I mean every single one… asked me, ‘How do you balance work and family?’” Upon comparing notes with her husband, Ben Affleck, she found: “As for work-life balance, he said no one asked him about it that day. As a matter of fact, no one had ever asked him about it.”

SHOULD WE BE STRIVING TO HAVE IT “ALL” OR STRIVING TO HAVE ENOUGH?

Debating whether or not women can “have it all” might just be a distraction from the day-to-day problems working parents face that can be addressed with concrete solutions. Balancing family and career—any career—is challenging enough, but it’s worth noting that Slaughter was splitting her time between Washington, D.C., where she held an exceptionally high level job at the State Department, and New Jersey, where her family resided. That may be impossible for anyone (mother, father, or not), and doesn’t deal with the day-to-day reality of paying for childcare, or balancing minimum wage hours, that many parents deal with. The “having it all” debate seems to swirl around women with particularly high-level jobs, ignoring the plight of working parents struggling to balance work and family without the benefit of an executive-level salary.

As Ann Friedman points out, “not every working woman is bound for the C-Suite,” and “[t]here are some women for whom ‘it all’ is a living wage and a paid day off when their kid is sick.” The United States lags painfully behind other nations when it comes to both maternity and paternity leave, with only “about twelve percent of American companies offer[ing] paid maternity or paternity leave in 2014.” Parental leave, affordable childcare, reasonable minimum wage… don’t these issues deserve more of our time and attention than a never-ending debate over whether or not women can “have it all”? As the New York Timesput it: “To say that women expect to ‘have it all’ is to trivialize issues like parental leave, equal pay and safe, affordable child care; it makes women sound like entitled, narcissistic battle-axes while also casting them as fools.”

Maybe, as Rebecca Traister has suggested, “[w]e should immediately strike the phrase ‘have it all’ from the feminist lexicon and never, ever use it again.” Instead of debating the ambiguous, abstract concept of having it all, we should be focusing on actual substantive solutions to make it possible for everyone—women and men, whether parents or child-free—to achieve some semblance of work/life balance. The semantics of the “having it all” debate tend to obscure the very real issues including “the ways in which sexism, the economic divide, the wage gap, and patriarchal models for public and personal life persist.” Instead of debating what it really means to “have it all,” and if having “all” that entails is even possible, we should focus on making sure everyone has enough.

Today, one of my best friends started her self-proclaimed “dream job,” and when she initially sent the good news through our group text, I swelled with pride. This girl is smart, brave and very good at what she does. Not only was I beaming with joy for her, but I was in awe—to be twenty-eight and starting your dream job?…

Today, one of my best friends started her self-proclaimed “dream job,” and when she initially sent the good news through our group text, I swelled with pride. This girl is smart, brave and very good at what she does. Not only was I beaming with joy for her, but I was in awe—to be twenty-eight and starting your dream job? Isn’t that the dream?

I, on the other hand, had just spent yet another day cold-emailing resumes to every position I thought I’d be even slightly qualified for, each time hoping the folks on the receiving end could see streaks of my potential through the large gaps in my resume. Yes, we move a lot. Yes, I left a lot of jobs. But can’t you see I’d be perfect for you?

Each click of the send button was an exercise in self-inflicting inner turmoil; please give me a job and do I even want to work there pressed equally in my head and heart. I’d close my eyes and all I could see was: What Are You Going To Do? And then, in the parentheses of my head, in a much smaller font: (what do you want to do?)

I thought of all the people in my life whose answer to both of those questions was the same—they had achieved dream job status. And me? Thirty, and still desperate for both of those answers. Or, even one answer.

I WANT TO FEEL… SUCCESSFUL… SO…?

This past January, I did what I typically do: reflected on the past year, thought of what I needed to improve on, and set some goals. After all, this was a big year—in a few weeks, I’d be turning thirty (something I always vowed never to do). It had to be brilliant.

As I’ve grown older and lived more, I’ve become more introspective. I used to want things. Things made me happy. But, when I make mental lists of goals now, I make them based on feelings, not things. I want to feel stronger, so I’ll try to run and do yoga consistently. I want to feel healthier, so I’ll eat cleaner. I want to feel like a better mother, so I’ll be more present when my kid is around.

I want to feel successful, so I’ll… ?

I am thirty and still hitting this roadblock. In the past, I’ve ignored it, and kept going. I was happy at work, and good at the job I was doing. It was meaningful work that made me feel alive, but I hardly thought I’d do it forever. I thought I’d do it for now.

NOTHING TO DO BUT DREAM

The people I envy lately are not those with the things and the power and the success, but the calm, and the stability and the knowledge that they’re doing what they most want to.

I don’t know what I want to do. The jobs I have are not my dream jobs. But I do them because I can and because my family needs me to.

I don’t know who I want to be. All I know is that I want to be someone.

I hope that in time, I can become one of those people who not only knows what they want to do, but is able to do it.

]]>http://apracticalwedding.com/2015/03/career-dreams-at-30/feed/107I Could Still Be a Ballerinahttp://apracticalwedding.com/2015/03/deciding-on-career-after-college/
http://apracticalwedding.com/2015/03/deciding-on-career-after-college/#commentsMon, 09 Mar 2015 11:30:35 +0000http://apracticalwedding.com/?p=123174123

I have never been a person who “knows what they want to be when they grow up.” I am not the person who has known since kindergarten that she was going to be a teacher, or the person who knew she was going into IT the first time her fingertips hit the keyboard.…

I have never been a person who “knows what they want to be when they grow up.” I am not the person who has known since kindergarten that she was going to be a teacher, or the person who knew she was going into IT the first time her fingertips hit the keyboard. I am not even the person who found her calling in college. I have always just been the person who… wanted to keep figuring it out.

People begin questioning our future career plans almost the minute we can speak. Sure, no one actually holds you to becoming the ballerina or firefighter that you dream of being at age four, but the question is always posed. I don’t remember what I said from ages three through eight, but I distinctly remember the answer I gave in third grade: hot air balloon pilot.

The reason behind this unique response (at least among the third graders I knew) came about because my dad’s company had recently participated in a hot air balloon festival. I was fascinated by the colorful bulbs floating high above me, the elementary physics I was taught in order to learn how the balloons flew, the teamwork of everyone preparing for lift off. However, in a windy turn of events, I wasn’t able to actually go up in a balloon. I was disappointed and knew that I really wanted to experience this someday. So, when asked a few weeks later what I wanted to do for a career project, I answered with something I knew I wanted to try.

From then on, this was how I answered the question. I picked careers that seemed like an adventure, a thing that I had to try. I didn’t necessarily have a plan as to how I would become a forensic psychologist or a cetologist, but I knew that I wasn’t going to sit around saying I was going to be a doctor, teacher, or lawyer. No, those things were for everyone else. Sure, you could have a passion for them, but I didn’t. And I certainly I wasn’t going to do anything I didn’t have a passion for.

This experiment came to a close when college applications started essentially asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” When asked to pick a potential major, or even a school to study within, there was no check box for “the one with the greatest opportunity for adventure.” There was obviously the trusty “undeclared,” section, but that didn’t seem right either. So I picked. I knew I liked science and making a difference, but wasn’t about to commit to becoming a doctor so… medical technology? Sure, why not, medical technology.

Classes started and I kept being gently swept down the medical technology stream. I took the classes and passed, even did well. I am smart and could do the work. My heart wasn’t really in it, but it wasn’t not in it either. But then came organic chemistry. It made me question everything. I am no quitter, but this class was the only one I have experienced where almost nothing clicked. I was out. For me, this meant a complete break-up with science.

I decided to spend the next semester trying different majors on for size. I took an acting class, a philosophy class, and a journalism class. While I loved all three, I decided that I had the best bet of paying back my student loans (albeit still very slowly) if I went with Cronkite instead of Descartes. I joined an alternative publication on campus that solidified my decision. I loved those weirdos more than anything and felt the work that we were doing was meaningful and edgy. I was finally comfortable answering, “What are you going to be?” with, “Journalist.”

Until I wasn’t.

I interned at a newspaper. Turns out I hate making people look bad, even when it’s the truth. From there, a communications internship. Hated that. Got a PR job at a nonprofit. Loved that. Moved to Michigan to work in higher education. And I like it just fine. But you know what? I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. And while I am not overly concerned with this, it has always made me feel bad. That I must lack passion. Or interest.

In her book #GIRLBOSS, Sophia Amoruso writes, “I’ve always been willing to throw myself at the wall and see if I stuck when it came to general life experiences.” When I read that, I practically yelled, “Yes! That’s me! That’s what I am doing! Someone gets me!” I realized that it’s not that I don’t have a passion. It’s that I have many. It’s not that I don’t have interests, it’s that I find the whole world fascinating. How can I simply pick just one thing?!

I figured when I moved to my tiny town for my now-husband’s job that my experimenting days were over. That the marketing job I had last jumped to was going to be it. But now? I realize that is so untrue that it’s almost laughable. Graduated does not equal career-decided. Married does not equal settled. And small-town life does not equal no more chances. While I know that I have to work hard at every opportunity and take care of our baby family, I also don’t have to stop experimenting.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll brainstorm a brilliant idea for a startup. Maybe life will take us on a grand adventure across the globe. Or maybe, I’ll end up high above the earth in that hot air balloon after all.

I stare at the Post-It stuck to my palm. There is a circle inked on it, thick and dark and empty. Across the table, the woman leading our teacher workshop describes how the shape we chose reflects our learning style. Maybe the circle means something positive, but I can’t tell you for sure.…

I stare at the Post-It stuck to my palm. There is a circle inked on it, thick and dark and empty. Across the table, the woman leading our teacher workshop describes how the shape we chose reflects our learning style. Maybe the circle means something positive, but I can’t tell you for sure. I don’t hear anything she says. Right now, at eight o’clock on a Thursday morning, I am being sucker-punched by the evidence drawn in my own hand. I have to get out of here.

“Excuse me,” I murmur, and slip into the hallway. Forehead pressed into the wall, I close my eyes and try to breathe. That simple circle has stirred the tiny but insistent voice in my gut that does a lot of talking these days: “Something’s not right!” Usually I ignore it, or growl at it to go away please! It makes me feel unreasonable, because with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, I’ve been blessed with a job that should be fulfilling, a cozy home, and a loving husband. But still. I don’t feel whole. Something’s missing and I’ve been running around in circles for years trying to find it. The overwhelming sense that my true self is a ghost in my own body won’t go away no matter how much I try to ignore it. The circle I drew today is not a symbol of my learning style—it’s a symbol of my non-learning style, my refusal to listen to myself. Well, this morning I finally get the picture. Literally.

At twenty-eight, it’s already time to change my adult life. Older friends who have transformed themselves in ways large and small suggest this is not unusual. As we approach our thirties, we finally veer off the track laid for us by other people’s expectations. This is the time to make your own plan, they say. I hem and haw and pretend I don’t know what to do, but that same insistent voice that burst out during the workshop has been telling me all along. I need a career change.

I’ve been a teacher for much of my twenties. Teachers are some of the most selfless, inspiring people out there, and my parents are educators. But that voice is telling me that I don’t want to work in a high school myself. The realization comes naturally. Actually deciding to leave my job is not so easy. I tell myself that I love teaching these kids, so I should just find a way to be happy. And besides, we can’t really afford for me not to work. There follow many months of agonizing, journaling, crying, and discussing. But I won’t find wholeness by keeping myself stuck. In the end I take a leap of faith.

I tell my principal that I will leave at the end of the school year, and I give myself two months—what would have been my summer vacation—to create new goals. I spend July making grandiose plans: I will get serious about the novel I’ve always dreamed of writing! I will apply to grad school! But August crawls by in a haze of anxiety: How ridiculous was the decision to quit? What am I doing with my life, anyway?

Then the little voice pipes up again through the avalanche of worry and guilt. “You might not have the answer yet, but for crying out loud, the world is not ending and you need to take care of us,” it says. A few minutes later, I walk by a building with the word YOGA written across the windows in letters almost as tall as my body. I take this as a sign and drag myself to a class. The studio is painted a soothing shade of green and smells like lavender. People speak quietly and smile kindly. My sharpest edges soften just by venturing into this space.

In the beginning, my inner critic still gets a kick out of torturing me. “You are hanging upside down while you should be looking for a job!” it shrieks during downward dog. “This is so uncomfortable! Why do you keep coming here?” it demands as my legs fold into pigeon pose. But slowly, as I test my body in new ways, I allow myself to absorb some lessons on my mat. I learn that it is possible and even empowering to breathe through doubt and fear and pain; to live in the present moment, thinking only of the sensations in my body; to sit in stillness and honor myself. Sprawled in the final pose of shavasana, I learn to push aside to-do lists and welcome peace to my body. One afternoon, months after I commit to this practice, I realize that my core is filled with light. I feel whole. Energy swells through my whole body, saying, “You are strong.”

I’m just starting to receive the results of my grad school applications, and haven’t made as much progress on that novel as I would like. But it turns out that I’ve already met one goal I didn’t even know needed setting, the one that proved most essential of all: I’ve learned to trust my true voice. And that makes anything feel possible.

I remember when I got together with my first girlfriend in college. I wanted us to work—I wanted us to be great, actually, in order for me to justify my gayness with my perfect relationship—so I looked around for someone to look up to.…

I remember when I got together with my first girlfriend in college. I wanted us to work—I wanted us to be great, actually, in order for me to justify my gayness with my perfect relationship—so I looked around for someone to look up to. At that time I did not know one married, stable, “grown up” queer couple. And between my fellow-college-student peers in LGBT relationships, and in the lesbian relationships I saw on TV (I came out when the L-word did), I mostly saw examples of the kind of relationship I didn’t want. So, my girlfriend and I noted the things we wanted to avoid, and we made the rest up as we went along.

Since that time, circumstances have improved for me, both in the relationship and in the relationship role model department. My wife, Julie, and I have been lucky enough to have some good gay lady friends and mentors, personally and professionally, and now we have some LGBT marriage role models to emulate as well. Which made it even more complicated when we recently became aware that one of our lesbian married couple role models was struggling. I mean, nobody is thrilled to hear that their friends are dealing with a rough patch, but when those friends are some of the only happily married gay people you personally see, it’s much easier to make it into a harbinger of imminent personal doom. We talked about our friends while we walked our dog in the park, and Julie half-jokingly said what we’d both been thinking, “They’re amazing. If they can’t make it, there’s no hope for us.”

The worst part was, the particular struggle this couple was having hit uncomfortably close to home. They’ve been dealing with differing viewpoints on baby making, and that metaphorically socked us both in the gut. Because, let’s be real. Lesbian baby making is not exactly straightforward, and we already know we’re headed down a steep and twisty path. Now, suddenly, we had incontrovertible proof that this process we’re right in the middle of considering could be perilous.

We knew, abstractly, that babies would be hard (the hosting another human in your body thing, the sleeping thing, the working thing, the whole possible inability to protect them from peril and tragedy and heartbreak thing), but now it wasn’t abstract at all. Acquisition and parenting of a kid has the potential to take us—take our marriage—right up to the edge, as demonstrated by our friends who we pretty much thought were much better at all of this than we were.

Of course, we’re not the only couple to be undone by parenting and marriage role models. Our friend, I’ll call her Lena, and her husband have a five-month-old baby. He is absolutely darling, and it’s good that he’s cute because his parents haven’t actually slept since he was born. Lena is a wonderful, loving, devoted parent—and a very smart woman. She put her formidable brain to work on the problem, and asked herself, in this situation, what would Bridget do? Our friend Bridget and her husband do seem to do everything well, and they are indeed wonderful parents to their toddler daughter. However, once her son refused to sleep for, well, his whole life so far, Lena lost some perspective. When she considered what Bridget would try, she forgot about the stories Bridget had told about buying every product on Amazon that promised some relief when her daughter refused to sleep for the first six months. She no longer remembered that Bridget and her spouse had moved into the guest bedroom in their stunning mountain home for a month because their baby was awake so often while they tried to teach her to sleep in her crib, that climbing the stairs from their room to hers fifteen times a night was no longer feasible. Instead, when Lena’s son finally slept in his swing, her sense of relief was washed away by doubt. She just knew that Bridget never would have had to resort to the swing. She would have instinctively known the answer, and it would have been perfect, and Lena would never be like that. And when finally Lena told Bridget, she laughed, because obviously she’d let her daughter sleep in the swing… or anywhere else she’d sleep even for a second. Obviously.

No matter the circumstances that led you there, feeling like you’re at the end of your rope always feels the same—no way out, and all alone. The email from our friends that detailed their current circumstances felt so familiar to me, because we’ve been there already, not the exact same situation, but crying and yelling at each other from opposite sides of the room, opposite sides of the damn planet. And feeling so shitty, not only because we’re fighting, but because, at that moment, deep down inside, we know that the people we admire—successful people—don’t ever, ever act like this. Strong people never let it get to this point.

But the whole point of community is to show us that’s a lie. When we start to look up to people, we don’t do it because we think they’re perfect. We do it because we like them, and we admire them. But then we get lost, and we end up comparing ourselves, and finding ourselves wanting—completely without evidence. To have people around us to remind us of the real truth was one of the whole points of having a wedding for me. We needed our community around us, to have a stake in our marriage, to remind us not only that we have their support but also that we are not alone in our wild imperfection. That they have also let their babies sleep in the swing, that they have gone to bed angry, that they struggled when they discussed the direction they wanted their futures to follow, and that they kept going forward anyway.

But now, it’s our turn to remind our friends that they’re not alone. And then we need to remind ourselves of that same thing. If deciding to have a baby isn’t what makes us doubt the strength of our marriage, then it will be something else, and we have to believe that we’ll get through it. Or maybe we won’t. But since we have no way of knowing, why not try? At least by trying, and believing, I know we’re modeling what I want anyone looking up to us to see.

In June, Pantene produced a video as part of their “Shine Strong” campaign showing thirty seconds of women over-apologizing followed by thirty seconds of things women can say instead of “sorry.” It touched off a storm of conversation in my friend group.…

In June, Pantene produced a video as part of their “Shine Strong” campaign showing thirty seconds of women over-apologizing followed by thirty seconds of things women can say instead of “sorry.” It touched off a storm of conversation in my friend group. We all felt we were guilty of it in some regard, and a couple of our male partners were driven up the wall by our tendency to apologize, but it was a hard habit to explain. The one woman who expressed making a conscious effort to not apologize told us how often she was called “bossy” or “mean,” or as one horrendous performance review from her boss put it, “not nice or warm enough to her colleagues.” (You know how you hear that all the time in men’s performance reviews. Excuse me while I bang my head against a wall.)

The conversation stayed with me. Then one day last month on the train home from work, a woman approached me and gestured to the empty window seat next to mine.

“Sorry,” she said, “but could I sit there?”

“Oh, sure! Sorry!” I said as I hopped up into the aisle to give her the seat.

I stood standing for a few seconds. Had we really both apologized for her needing a seat? It bothered me so much I decided that for one week I was going to keep track of every time a woman apologized to me. And I was going to apologize for nothing. Even when things were my fault. It was so much more difficult than I’d anticipated.

I didn’t know of the study until the Pantene video, but it seemed to be everywhere afterwards. Over-apologizing was reported on by several major media outlets, and in response articles to the video women admitted to apologizing for everything from a bad shot in a tennis match to bumping into a family member in the kitchen.

Though some felt the tendency to apologize was a sign of being more empathetic, my feeling was that all the shit I was being sorry for could be put down to habit and not being confident enough to simply say what I meant. It’s not that I walk around everyday feeling insecure. But interrupting someone or sharing an off-topic thought or stepping on someone’s foot without apologizing seemed… less nice. Which reminded me of my friend’s unfair performance review, where she was scolded for not being “nice enough.”

Being a “nice girl” was a stereotype I had a lot of feelings about, especially given that I grew up only caring about being nice and how much people liked me and never saying anything that someone might disagree with. Then I went to a women’s college and rounded out my college experience by making a man cry after he insulted me. So why did I still feel the need to be so sorry about everything? Turns out, it was a combination of social expectation and simple habit.

The week of women apologizing to me

At the end of the first day of my experiment, I accidentally apologized for buying yogurt we already had, and then said, “Oh man, I’m not supposed to be apologizing for things this week! Sorry about that.” While my fiancé burst into laughter, I considered how bone-deep this habit had become and how hard it was going to be to break. I think my exact thoughts were: “Well, fuck.”

But listening to other women apologize made me extra conscious of the things I was saying myself.

One woman apologized to me as she came out of a public restroom because I was waiting in line to use it. Another woman apologized to me for going into a public restroom that she was waiting in line to use. A colleague apologized for spilling water on her own desk; my college roommate pre-empted asking me a favor by saying “sorry”; a woman I was in the elevator with apologized for almost getting off at the wrong floor. My list of apologies is longer than I could have imagined.

Meanwhile, one day while I was having lunch in a coffee shop, a man approached me and said the following: “Excuse me, but you’re right in the shot I want to get for Instagram. Could I get you to stand up for just a few seconds?” When I did, he moved my chair with my purse on it, snapped the photo, and said, “Cool! Thanks!” and then walked away without putting my chair back. Five minutes after I sat back down, a woman came up and said, “I’m so sorry, but can I steal this chair from you?” It was an empty chair I was obviously not using. And she was sorry to take it away. But I mean… was she?

Are we really saying “sorry” when we apologize for these everyday actions? Or is it just a way to be unobtrusive? To get what we want without having to disturb someone? To enter and exit the stage with as little fuss and drama as possible, barely there in the first place? I don’t think it’s an accident that I both worry more about my weight than my fiancé does and also apologize more. There is something in me that seems to think the less space I take up, the better.

At the end of the week, though, I stepped on someone’s foot and the first words that came out of my mouth weren’t an apology. They were, “Whoops! Well, that was graceful. Did I hurt you?” I hadn’t. And the world moved right along.

And then came judgment

I’ve apologized way less since my experimental week. It’s been about a month now, and I’m surprised by how some of my relationships changed. A male colleague insisted one day that he be allowed to squish into the backseat of a small car because I was, “a lady” and, “ladies shouldn’t have to contort themselves like that.”

“Dude,” I said, “You’re a foot taller than me. And as a lady, I am also possessed of legs that bend. I’m sitting in the back,” I bit down on the instinct to throw a “sorry” in there. He was the one being an ass. “You know, they say chivalry is dead. I guess you’re the one who killed it,” he said. He told that story for days.

But you know what? He told it to our mutual superior one day while we were waiting for a meeting to start—a woman I’ve always admired but never quite connected with—and she smiled at me and said, “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

I did apologize to the dog for waking up late one day and making him wait for a walk, so let’s not call this habit broken just yet. But it’s easier and easier to not apologize for things that, I’m realizing, were never my fault to begin with. I exist. I’m not going to be sorry for that.

Outside a gilded, eight-hundred year old pagoda in a part of Burma that is rapidly developing but still holds the charm of the country’s ox cart-driven, cloistered recent history, I walked through rows of women selling souvenirs with my one-year-old strapped to my chest.…

Outside a gilded, eight-hundred year old pagoda in a part of Burma that is rapidly developing but still holds the charm of the country’s ox cart-driven, cloistered recent history, I walked through rows of women selling souvenirs with my one-year-old strapped to my chest. I passed a woman holding a baby in her arms, too. Both she and the boy had thanaka, a powdery yellow sunscreen/bug repellent/makeup smeared on their cheeks. “How old?” she asked, pointing to my boy snoozing on my chest. I told her it was nearly his first birthday, and she explained her son was just a few months older than mine. “Will he eat lots of food? Mine will only take my boob!” I nodded in commiseration and pointed to my son, because he, too, is stubbornly attached to me more than I’d like him to be.

A few weeks earlier in Northern Thailand, we’d visited an elephant sanctuary where the animals roam freely through the misted forest. We heard trumpeted calls echo from downriver, and I wouldn’t have been all that surprised if a velociraptor suddenly emerged from the horizon. But it was another (human) mother that caught my attention. She cooed at my kid in Thai while he was still strapped to my chest. She wanted to know his age; she had a son born just a week after mine. “Can I show you some photos?” Of course. She whipped out her camera and showed me her comical overabundance of photographic evidence of her kid laughing, drinking a bottle, and flashing his first toothy smiles. My camera, like perhaps the cameras of mothers everywhere in the world, is similarly filled with over-documentation of my kid. It was her first day back at work, she explained, and she was struggling with leaving her son at daycare for the first time. Find me a mom who hasn’t held some anxiety the first time she left her baby for the day.

I would’ve guessed even before my travels with my son that mothers the world over struggle with getting their kids to eat, sleep, and remain happy in ways that work for the rest of the family, too. But my time in Southeast Asia made me wonder why I had to travel twenty hours by plane to have these conversations openly with other moms. The moms in the markets, on sidewalks, and selling souvenirs in these places lead lives that barely intersect with my own, yet we found ourselves hopping cultural and language barriers to commiserate and connect.

At home in Los Angeles, the conversations don’t flow as freely. I’ve spotted weary new parents with familiar heavy eyelids passing me on the sidewalk, and all I want is to ask if their kid still wakes up every two hours at night, too. I want to fistbump the mom who figured out how to gracefully nurse in public, and I want to hear how daycare is going for the mom standing behind me in line for coffee on her way to work.

Instead of fostering new friendships or providing a framework for support, though, my interactions with other parents in LA don’t feel nearly as open as they were in Asia. The moms I met in Thailand and Burma shared their experiences with bottle feeding or breasts, going back to work or even bringing the kid along for the ride. That I might not have fed, clothed, or cared for my own kid in different ways remained mostly irrelevant.

The simple fact that I was also a mom served as impetus enough for a friendly interaction. Back at home, it’s harder to talk about these supposedly ubiquitous parenting dilemmas while I’m also doing my best not to offend or judge, or to be judged in return. Even among friends, I pause before sharing that I let my kid eat cheeseburgers or that he sleeps in my bed sometimes, or that I traveled with him to a region of the world without familiar food/customs/babyproofing.

Perhaps the endless array of choices that oversaturate modern parenthood in America is what makes all the minute parenting choices so divisive. Or maybe it’s that we’ve largely lost the idea that child-raising is a community effort, so even fellow moms don’t expect to give or receive support from others outside their trusted inner circle of nuclear family and a few friends.

Whatever the reason it’s difficult to positively connect with other parents when I’m home, my time in Southeast Asia gave me the dose of perspective to realize that I much prefer meeting moms in places where we can be on the same team, even if one of us makes parenting choices the other wouldn’t.

How do I make this happen at home? I don’t know. I’m open to pretending I’m in Burma and stopping stroller-wielding moms on the sidewalks of my neighborhood to talk about boobs, enthusiastically and judgment-free. Maybe that’s a start.

]]>http://apracticalwedding.com/2015/02/talking-about-motherhood-internationally/feed/99I’m Not Having an Affair (But I Watched One on TV)http://apracticalwedding.com/2015/02/binge-watching-tv-alone/
http://apracticalwedding.com/2015/02/binge-watching-tv-alone/#commentsFri, 20 Feb 2015 12:30:44 +0000http://apracticalwedding.com/?p=123171716Here in Shanghai, we have a television with a complicated remote and a host of channels running costumed dramas from various stages of Chinese history. We hardly ever turn it on. Instead we stream shows from the strange underworld of pirate websites that require patience and a quick hand eliminating pop-ups.…

Here in Shanghai, we have a television with a complicated remote and a host of channels running costumed dramas from various stages of Chinese history. We hardly ever turn it on. Instead we stream shows from the strange underworld of pirate websites that require patience and a quick hand eliminating pop-ups. Or rather, I stream. I like television a lot more than my fiancé does.

Sometimes Dan will be writing in his office and I’ll sneak into the bedroom and watch a show or two under the pretense of writing or working or whatever Dan actually thinks I’m doing. We have heavy curtains that soften the constant traffic noise and block the sun, and I snuggle half-under our IKEA comforter with my computer on my lap, happily absorbed in the drama du jour. Which is what happened a couple of weeks ago when I started watching The Affair. One episode of the steamy Showtime drama became another until I was three episodes in and ready to commit to the rest of the season.

Being Apart, Together

A part of me wanted to tell Dan about the show. I knew he would have been interested in the Rashomon-style storyline, the way the narrative flips back and forth between the lovers Noah and Alison, giving its viewers two sometimes contradictory accounts. But that evening as we got ready to go out with friends, Dan asked me about my afternoon—“How’d everything go?”— and I replied only “Good.” I didn’t mention The Affair. This wasn’t exactly a lie, but an omission. Those three hours of my day went unaccounted for.

I told myself that there were several reasons for this silence. Despite the rise of the acclaimed HBO-style drama and the Atlantic’s post-episode commentary on each and every Game of Thrones, television still feels like the lazy person’s entertainment to me, a true escapism. Television is not work. And not-work is a hard thing for a Protestant girl like me to accept, especially when there is always work to be done—grading papers or writing pages or sweeping the corner of the dining room where all my stray hair manages to collect. Shame is an excellent conductor of secrets.

I also justified my secret as an issue of personal space. Because we live abroad away from our families and dearest friends and because we have the same job at the same new university, Dan and I spend a lot of time together. Our offices at work are about twelve steps apart, but at home Dan and I have two separate spaces—our screens. We flip through different websites and different Twitter feeds. We’re at work on own projects. We need our own space, and our computers have a way of providing that space, even when our schedules don’t.

Still, what accounted for guilty little flip in my chest when Dan came into the room? And why had I immediately clicked out of the tab, as though I was doing something wrong?

Are We Doomed to Hit Repeat?

The Affair awoke my unspoken anxiety about what our marriage might be like in our forties: Dan and I will never be summering in Montauk, but maybe I will be a perfectly nice, slightly naggy wife, and Dan will be a dissatisfied one-novel writer who sleeps with a waitress. The implied assertion throughout The Affair is that most men cheat at a certain age. I didn’t want my future husband to have yet another model of middle-aged infidelity. There are too many of those already. If stories teach us how to live, I didn’t want to be married to the cheatin’ Noah Salloway; I wanted to be Connie Britton married to Coach Taylor.

But meanwhile, I was the one sneaking around with a television show.

In a recent New York Timespiece, philosopher Clancy Martin argues that “good lovers lie.”Good lies protect our partners. They can keep us from hurting one another; they serve as necessary buffers, and as means to a better end. “Love is a greater good than truth,” he writes. (Martin’s example of a bad lie? Sleeping with a colleague at an academic conference.) But if omission is a lie, when does it become a bad one? And can a television show even count as a secret? Maybe sometimes it does.

The Affair wasn’t The Amazing Race or some other delightfully staged reality drama. The Affair was something else. Dan and I had spent the past year discussing and anticipating our upcoming marriage, and here I was watching a show about infidelity that was causing me to reflect on marriage, what it might be, and what it could look like. Not telling Dan about what I was watching felt like a real withholding. It felt wrong.

And so, five episodes in, I confessed both my watching and my worries. Dan lay next to me to watch episodes six and seven, while I detailed all the plot points necessary to catch him up, and then he let me watch the rest of the season on my own. The next week, over bad Shanghai margaritas at our local bar, I gave him the rundown on every twist and turn of the betrayal.

The best television is a repository for our fears. Hence The Affair (and the zombies of The Walking Dead). While Dan and I can’t know with absolute certainty whom we will love fifteen years from now, we’re saying our vows because we plan for it to be one another (plus a few kids). Television often tells us that we’re doomed, and we have to tell ourselves that we’re not. For us, part of that telling is being honest about the fear itself.

“One is apt to think of etiquette as being of importance to none but brides, or diplomats, or perhaps persons lately elected to political office.” —Emily Post, 1956

My husband is the nicest man I have ever met. In the beginning months of our relationship, I experienced more anxiety than with any other boyfriend ever because he was so kind and trustworthy that I was sure it was a con job.…

“One is apt to think of etiquette as being of importance to none but brides, or diplomats, or perhaps persons lately elected to political office.” —Emily Post, 1956

My husband is the nicest man I have ever met. In the beginning months of our relationship, I experienced more anxiety than with any other boyfriend ever because he was so kind and trustworthy that I was sure it was a con job. He’s everything I ever wanted in a partner: creative, smart, funny, adventurous, respectful, and kind.

But, you guys, he slurps his soup, and just last week? He took the last piece of pie without even hesitating.

I thought I was an open-minded individual (don’t we all) until I discovered that not all people grew up learning the same table etiquette as me. In my house, we all waited for everyone to be served and said grace before picking up our own utensils to eat. We served others before ourselves, and we always passed things along; no reaching allowed. We said please and thank you, our napkins were in our laps, my parents did not answer the phone during dinnertime, and—above all else—no one ever took the last piece of anything.

Most of my life looks very different than my childhood, adult autonomy (like my bedtime) notwithstanding. I’ve always been a working mom, so babysitters are a huge part of our life. I allow my daughter to read books that are more mature than I was allowed to read at her age. I’d prefer it if she’d spend all day collecting wildflowers and breathing fresh air, but I let her watch television or play on the computers sometimes, even when it’s a beautiful day outside. My parents were religious and conservative, so our household is different on all fronts in that department. I am not raising my daughter religiously, so there is no grace before meals.But of all things that I was raised to believe were important, it’s table manners that I have the hardest time letting go of.

Discussing it with my brother the other day, I discovered he has the same problem. We were laughing about how much it drives us absolutely bonkers when someone reaches across a table for something instead of asking us to pass it to them, or serves themselves without passing the dish along or offering to serve everyone else first. And my brother and I had the same question for the world: why on Earth do manners matter, anyway?! Ever since moving away from home, they’ve caused us nothing but discomfort and irritation towards others.

I hate it when I feel discomfort and irritation toward anyone, but especially when I feel those feelings bubbling up toward my boyfriend-now-husband because he doesn’t have his napkin on his lap or he brought his phone to the table. I don’t know why I care. So I talked to him about it a little bit, and I thought about it for myself a lot more. What is the big deal, anyway?

Emily Post takes etiquette seriously, so I pulled down the old book that represents playful irony in our house by supporting a speaker instead of acting as a useful text (until now). Reading chapter one, I found lots of things to laugh about, such as this gem: “Certainly the greatest asset that a man or woman or even a child can have is charm.” The greatest asset, seriously? But then my eye caught a passage that I read again and again.

“What is the purpose of this rule? Does it help the make life pleasanter? Does it make the social machinery run more smoothly?”

I consider this passage as applied to my childhood, and I see our strict table manners in a new light. I was the second child of four, and in between two sisters who had severe disabilities. My older sister had Down syndrome. My younger sister, in a twist of mere coincidence, is developmentally delayed and emotionally disturbed. Life for my parents was about doctors’ offices, behavior specialists, special education schools, bus pickups and drop-offs, special diets, special meetings, and lots and lots of heartache. They strived to provide a full life for all their children; my brother and I were active in sports, marching band, play dates, high school dances, and voice lessons. In short, my parents were exhausted all the time. Through this lens, our table manners make a lot more sense. Sure, my mother wanted us to know appropriate behavior for the world, but I think it was more than that. Life was so chaotic, couldn’t dinnertime be one half hour of relative peace, didn’t manners help our “social machinery run more smoothly”? People stared at our family a lot. I think its fair that my parents might have hoped that our manners illustrated a modicum of functionality and class despite the disruptions my sisters usually caused in public. My mom learned about leaving the last piece of everything so that her father could have lunch the next day, which he learned was important as a child in the Great Depression. It was understandable then, it is helpful now. Routine is calming, and this was one part of life that could offer my mom and dad soothing expectations and reliable results.

Using this new understanding, I watch my daughter and husband at the dinner table, and appreciate my adult life that is, so far, much less stressful than anything my parents were facing when they were my age with four children. My daughter certainly knows all the tenets of dinnertime behavior, but it isn’t what makes life pleasanter on a day-to-day basis.

You know what does make life pleasanter? My husband, who has taught her how to build sugar packet pyramids, and play table football with creamers. On one of our fist dinners out as a family, Lily wore clip-on earrings to the restaurant, and he borrowed one and put it on his nose. The table next to us thought he was playing with his food, and their disgust made him laugh because he doesn’t care what people think of our family, and so what if it was noodles or jewelry up his nose? By serving himself first, he’s introduced the concept of taking care of one’s self, instead of always, always putting the needs of others first. This is huge for me, after a life built around caring for everyone else without stopping to think about what I need, whether it’s money, or mashed potatoes, or comfort. It took me two years into our relationship to make myself a snack without automatically making a second one for him; it hadn’t occurred to me that he would help himself if he was hungry or—most importantly—that he loved me regardless. Turns out that manners are not about love, not really. Instead, they’re about respect, and there are many ways to show respect (even while taking the last piece of pie). He’s agreed to keep his phone away from the table, and I am trying to relax about whether or not he eats with the right fork. Now I’m working on asking things to be passed to me, instead of assuming that my parents were everyone’s parents, or that anyone can read my mind.

And, the biggest sign of growth was my recent participation in a dinnertime funny-face contest. I won, hands down, and I didn’t care when we were laughing so hard that my daughter fell from her chair onto the floor and spilled her drink.

While I often wish that Brian had been my first and only husband, there are some advantages to going into marriage with your eyes wide, wide open. One of these is an enhanced consciousness of “the rules” that govern your relationship.…

While I often wish that Brian had been my first and only husband, there are some advantages to going into marriage with your eyes wide, wide open. One of these is an enhanced consciousness of “the rules” that govern your relationship. Anyone who has been married more than once knows how shockingly different marriages can be. Not only were my two marriages different, my behavior within them has been different. I believe that this is because marriage is an entity of its own, that is bigger than the two people in it. Every marriage is a micro-culture governed by its own mythology, language, rituals, and rules, which we both create and conform to. Usually the rules are subconscious, but Brian and I have found in our seven years together that being deliberate about defining them can be romantic, hilarious, and helpful. Here are the biggies in our house:

1. When the “do not disturb sign” is on the bedroom door, Children shalt not disturb. In fact, this rule is so strong that it’s really a norm. The couple of times children did knock on the door, we didn’t get angry, we just threw on a robe, went to the door, and acted alarmed and confused. Like: Why are you knocking? Are the dogs mauling the neighbor children? Did you sever your jugular with the sharp edge of a tuna can? No? You’re hungry? Did you see the sign? (Close door on little face, finish, and twenty minutes later emerge fully clothed to make snacks.) We do not abuse the sign. We reserve it for those times when privacy is needed, then put up an impenetrable virtual wall. The DNDS can also be used when you desperately need alone time, or if you are going to be “more than naked” (see rule 9). In our house, if the DNDS is on the door, and you enter, it is at your peril. The DNDS is about cordoning off private (and sometimes erotic) space, and respecting the adults’ absolute right to privacy.

2. If thou gets up first, Thou shalt bring coffee to the person who is still in bed. This started off as a little nicety, and has become a foundational ritual in our marriage. It takes almost no time or extra effort, since whoever is up is making a pot of coffee anyway. It’s an extra cup mixed to taste, a trip up the stairs, and a few moments of connection before the day begins. But it’s so much more than that for us… It’s a daily affirmation that we will be kind to each other today. And half the time it’s coffee in bed.

3. Thou shalt never backseat drive. If one has the wheel, the other may navigate, make calls, research the destination, and/or adjust the radio, but nagging/screaming/correcting is way out of bounds. Brian is a very good driver, and he takes backseat driving as a profound insult to his competence. I am, ahem, excitable. Backseat driving makes me panic and have flashbacks to meaner, rougher relationships I survived. Though the reason for the rule is different for each of us, the meaning behind the gesture is the same: We trust the other person enough to really and truly surrender control.

4. Thou shalt have Family Dinner. Without electronics. If you are starving, fine, you can consume your food earlier, but unless the circumstances are truly extenuating we sit together for a few minutes every night and take turns telling about the best and worst moments of the day. Like the do not disturb sign, this is bigger than a rule—it’s the way we do things around here. It’s part of our family’s rhythm. The days it doesn’t happen, we all feel a little off.

5. Thou shalt keep thy spouse apprised of thy mental state. This is an interesting one, that has its roots in the functional. I used to get some panic attacks, and I am recovering from an eating disorder. Whenever I feel “those feelings” coming on, I find Brian (or call him) and I tell him what’s happening, and sort of narrate the experience until it passes. But then we started doing it before things get to that level. If Brian is feeling a little irritated he will announce: “I am feeling irritable, and I’m not sure why. I am going to put the Do Not Disturb Sign on the Door for awhile and try to figure it out.” If we notice that the other person seems to be struggling with something, we will gently bring it up and invite narration. I think it’s a way to cultivate mindfulness in our relationship and invite equanimity into the situation.

6. Thou shalt deny the TYRANNY of urgency. Closely related to number 5, something I have really learned from experience is that almost nothing is truly urgent. Short of medical emergencies, almost NOTHING requires a response rightthissecond, and responding, kneejerk, while flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, is rarely the best course of action. This seems to be particularly true in marriage—and especially when we feel provoked, ashamed, upset, or angry. We try to encourage ourselves, and the other person, to just… pause. And breathe. Breathing is good while pausing. Sometimes snacks while pausing are helpful (ref: Hangry). And stepping outside to get some air. And petting a dog. Related to this, going to sleep angry is allowed in our house. Because it’s rarely truly urgent, and sometimes you aren’t that angry, you’re just exhausted, and a little sleep makes the situation more manageable.

7. Thou shalt accompany thy spouse to scary medical appointments. And hold their hand, if at all possible. Because nothing makes a person feel more fragile, vulnerable, and mortal than medical shit, and one of the reasons you got married in the first place, if you are really honest with yourself, was to beat back that feeling.

8. Thou shalt honeymoon. Annually, if possible. Brian and I love to travel, and once a year we travel, just the two of us, stay in a great hotel, order room service, loll around in bed in new underthings, wander cobbled streets holding hands, and tell everybody it’s our honeymoon. We had a coffee table made with a shadowbox under glass and each trip gets its own compartment filled with little tchotkes and detritus from our latest trip. The trips—long weekends mostly (and sometimes tagged onto work trips)—give us something to look forward to all year, and the honeymoon table is a reminder of the special times we’ve spent discovering interesting things together. We savour those honeymoons long before they begin and long after they are over, and before we know it, it’s time to plan the next one!

9. Thou shalt avoid being more than naked around thy spouse. Some things are more than naked. Like me, wrestling myself into Spanks. Like him, wearing only socks and a baseball cap. Like leaving the door to the bathroom open. Like period underwear. You know what I’m talking about.

10. Thou shalt not sabOtAge thy partner’s efforts to get healthy. Man, this one is hard. I like baking things for my family, and I love it when they enjoy my creations. I want, very badly, to pull Brian back into bed next to me to snuggle up and forgo the gym. We do not browbeat or guilt one another into fitness kicks, but if the other person is in one, we do our best not to sabotage. Because strong and flexible and confident is sexy. And we want to be together, in health, as long as possible.

11.The minibar is a state of mind. Before I married Brian, part of my growing up family mythology was that raiding the minibar is the 8th mortal sin. But Brian taught me that the minibar is a state of mind. It goes something like this: sometimes you need a $5 mini bottle of Pringles. Or an overpriced shirt from that sporting event you saw live. If you can, spring for the good tickets to the Broadway show or the concert. There are some expenses that you just surrender to and enjoy the heck out of. Brian loves his Tottenham shirt from that English Premiership game we saw live. Billy Elliot in London’s West End was better sitting dead center in the fifteenth row. This rule is about paying the price of admission and fully enjoying the experience. And you can always sweeten the guilt with a $4 bag of peanut M&Ms…

12. Thou shalt kiss tHY partner goodbye. Always. With eye contact and arms wrapped around each other and full on body presses and breathing in the other person’s neck. Because he’s my love, and I want him to know it as we go out to conquer the world. And I like to smell him on my clothes all morning.

There are others, of course, many backed up by evidence and studies (don’t gossip about each other, never shame each other in public, use a respectful tone of voice, always pack snacks, etc.). But these are the rules that make our marriage unique, special, and ours. Now if you’ll excuse me, Valentine’s Day is this weekend, and I have a honeymoon to plan.